Earlier this month State Senator Jerry Hill and State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson invited educators and community members to attend a Town Hall Meeting On Education with San Mateo County Superintendent of Schools Anne Campbell and Santa Clara County Superintendent of Schools Jon Gundry. According to Senator Hill, “We are in the two counties that have exceptional and the most effective superintendents of any I’ve seen in California.”
After many quality questions were asked and answered, the audience became privy to much of the inner workings of each educational office and the future goals of both superintendents. Below are a few excerpts that dealt with the question of teacher retention and return on investment of early learning.
When asked about the critical shortage of teachers in Silicon Valley, Superintendent Gundry agreed that there will be a very serious teacher shortage in just a few years. “We know this because in our teacher preparation programs there are only about half the number of teachers we are going to need five years from now,” he said. “We are talking about a marketing campaign to persuade people to become teachers. We are talking about, in my office, working with our teacher’s aids and getting them certificates so we can recruit people within our midst. It’s going to be very hard to recruit people outside the area because of the high cost of living.”
State Superintendent Torlakson also weighed in. “It’s a crisis, and we are seeing the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “There is also the retention issue. We are loosing 17 percent to 18 percent of beginning teachers within three to four years after they have come into the classroom because they are not receiving the mentoring and support they need. When they get the support, they stay. They choose teaching as their profession.” Superintendent Anne Campbell discussed, among many other things, San Mateo County’s Big Lift, a countywide effort to provide two years of high-quality preschool, and programs to reduce chronic absence, end summer learning loss and engage families and the broader community to support learning in school and at home. According to Campbell the payoff will be well worth the investment.
“We had Stanford Business School do a model of return on investment for the core component parts of The Big Lift,” she said. “They presented their results to us earlier this spring and their findings show an 11 to 1 return on investment. So that — especially for our higher risk kids, the kids who are most vulnerable to the achievement gap — for every dollar that you invest early on, the likelihood is, if the model is viable and correct, that you will get $11 back in terms of earning of the individual as he or she goes through life.”
Superintendent Gundry also has an early learning initiative called Stronger Start. “This is the number one priority of my office,” he said. “Children are not getting the proper input or proper nurturing in language development that they need in early life. This is more than just educating kids in pre-school. It’s also about educating parents because they are the first teachers and the ones who have a very, very significant effect on their child’s very early development which is going to have a significant effect on how well they learn and achieve later in life.”
For more information on Santa Clara County Office of Education, go to http://www.sccoe.org.
For more information on San Mateo County Office of Education, go to http://www.smcoe.org.
Contact Margaret Lavin at elementarydays@gmail.com.
